Nightfall at Little Aces

by Ralph Cotton

  “Yes,” said Gale, “it was that same scoundrel.” He shook his head at the irony of it.

  Emma’s troubled look returned to her face. “Memphis Beck is wanted for murder?”

  “Yep,” said Gale, still dumbfounded by it. “The posse is gone to find his body right now.”

  Emma caught herself gasping. “His body?”

  “The two detectives shot him,” said Gale. “He was wounded bad, they say. Seems like all they need to do now is find where he holed up to die. If he’s not dead it doesn’t matter. They’ve said they would string him up. With witnesses, it would stand up in court.”

  Emma stood in silence, picturing Memphis Beck dying alone on some lonely hillside. Worse yet, she pictured him wounded and helpless, being pushed up into a saddle with a rope around his neck.

  “I don’t know how in the world this come about,” said Gale. “But it sure gets us both off the hook, them thinking they saw Beck killed Omar. Skimmer didn’t seem real happy with the idea. But I expect he’ll come around after a while. He has to.”

  “You said you dropped Omar down a deep ravine,” Emma said, confronting him. “How did he wind up along the trail?”

  “I did drop him down a ravine,” said Gale. “The only thing I can figure is he must’ve rolled down into the stream and it washed him downhill.” He looked away reflectively. “What are the odds of him and Warren Beck ever ending up together?”

  Emma lowered her head and closed her eyes for a moment. As strange as this was, it cleared up everything for her.

  “So that’s that, I reckon,” said Gale. “Now I’ve got to go make some rounds. But I’ll be back tonight. Maybe before this full moon ends, we can take a stroll in the moonlight. Wouldn’t that be nice? Just the two of us out for the evening?”

  “Yes, it would,” Emma replied, deep in thought, hardly realizing she’d answered him.

  “Well, all right, then, it’s a date?” Gale asked, elated that she’d agreed to something so personal between the two of them.

  “Yes,” Emma answered absently, so absorbed in thought she barely heard him close the kitchen door behind himself and walk across the back porch and around the side of the house.

  Even in her grief for Memphis Beck, she realized that this bizarre turn of events ended any hold the sheriff might have had on her. There were credible witnesses saying they saw Omar Wills Skimmer murdered out along the trail. That separated her from ever having had anything to do with the man.

  “Good-bye, Sheriff,” she murmured to herself.

  Taking off her apron, she tossed it aside and walked to her bedroom. She flipped back a corner of a rug, kneeled down to a small square panel in the wood floor, and lifted it open.

  Chapter 15

  Curtis Clay smelled blood in the air. He’d first caught a scent of it when he stepped out a half hour earlier and followed Little Dog to the barn to check on the dun’s stone bruise. It came to him again on a calm drift of air through the open window of his shack when he’d returned from the barn. This time it came stronger; it was a scent of human blood, he determined, his nostrils flaring a bit in recognition.

  He walked over and closed the window, Little Dog right in front of him. Then he stopped for a moment and reopened the window. “Not smelling it don’t mean it’s not there, Little Dog,” he said toward the dog at his feet, as if closing the window had been Little Dog’s idea. “No, sir,” he affirmed to himself on his way back to his chair.

  There were times he wondered if his blindness had heightened his sense of smell, or if this was indeed his having the gift, that elusive supernatural insight he’d heard people talk about when he was a child growing up on the harsh Kansas plains. Curtis’ gift, his mother and grandmother would say. God felt so bad ’bout what he done to Curtis that he gave him the “gift.”

  His gift…? He didn’t know about that. He had lived too long with whatever fueled and informed him to see it as a gift. He had never considered his blindness a curse, but he would never think of it as a gift. Whatever voids his blindness had left in him, his remaining senses had rallied together and filled from within their own resource. Gift? Curse? He didn’t know. But there was blood on the still air today. He knew it. Yet he tilted back his head, noting some other, more pleasant scent coming to him.

  Was it her? The widow woman? Yes, it most certainly was. There was no mistaking it.

  At his feet he felt Little Dog stand up toward the door with a quiet whimper. Arising from his wooden chair, Curtis hurried to the door, arriving almost tripping over the dog who had to race to stay in front of him.

  Man and dog arrived just as Curtis Clay heard the quiet knock of Emma’s hand. “Mr. Clay? Hello, Mr. Clay. Are you in there?” she asked through the door.

  Clay smiled to himself and clumsily ran his hands over his tangled hair. “Yes, ma’am, I’m here,” he said, opening the door, feeling Little Dog crowd forward against his ankle.

  “Oh, thank goodness,” said Emma. “I went to the barn and didn’t find Mr. Woolard there. I—I hope you can help me.”

  “Yes, ma’am, any way I can,” Clay offered. Even as he spoke he caught the scent of blood again. But he ignored it, knowing that the woman did not smell it, and knowing that mentioning such things to people with sight served no purpose.

  “I need to hire a buggy, Mr. Clay,” she said, sounding harried. “I need it right away. Can you help me?”

  “Yes, ma’am. I can fix you up with a rig, sure enough,” said Clay. He felt his hand beside the door and picked up his walking stick. He stepped out of his shack, feeling Little Dog move away from his ankle and out in front of him.

  In the barn, Emma felt a stab of sorrow when she saw Beck’s big dun standing in its stall. But she looked away and tried to put Memphis Beck and his horse out of her mind. One thing she’d learned riding with Beck and the Hole-in-the-wall Gang, it was that no matter what happened, you kept on going.

  Go until it all stops around you, she recalled Beck himself telling her a long time ago.

  That was what he’d tell her today too, if he could; and that was exactly what she intended to do. Go until you drop, she told herself, following Clay out back and watching him walk into the corral and tap his way forward, following the elderly stiff-walking canine.

  When Clay finished preparing the horse and buggy right in the open front doors of the livery barn, Emma took money from her dress pocket and paid him. “I’ll have the buggy for the next two days,” she said, knowing full well that once out of Little Aces she was never coming back.

  The tone of her voice told Clay that she didn’t mean what she’d said. But he only nodded and held out his hand to assist her up onto the buggy step. “Yes, ma’am, you keep it as long as you need it.”

  Clay felt an unsteadiness in her hand as she took his and climbed up into the buggy seat. In spite of her calm voice and determined bearing, she was afraid of something, he thought. What he felt coming from her was what he would expect to feel from someone racing to keep from being caught. A fox ahead of the hounds, he thought; only this fox still needed to widen the distance.

  “Is everything all right, Mrs. Vertrees?” Clay ventured, knowing it was not an appropriate thing for him to ask.

  “What? Oh yes, Mr. Clay,” Emma said, a bit taken aback, not so much by the inappropriateness of his question, but rather by the fact that he had noticed her state of mind. She took a deep breath, calmed herself, and kept careful control of her voice. “I just have so many things I need to do today. Thank you so much for your help.”

  “You’re welcome, ma’am, and good day to you,” Clay said. Everything was not all right. But how could he tell her he knew that? And if he could tell her he knew it, what then? He stepped back in silence, Little Dog right beside him, and gestured her forward. “If I can ever do anything for you…” He let his words trail.

  “You are too kind, Mr. Clay,” Emma said, “and good day to you too.”

  There, she thought, chucking the buggy reins and
sending the horse forward. Had she played it calmly enough? Had she sounded like a woman with nothing more on her mind than her usual household chores or the cost of a bolt of gingham? She drove the buggy the short distance to the picket fence behind her yard, stepped down, and walked through the gate.

  At the porch step she noted a half of a boot print streaked with dark blood, but her first thought was that she or the sheriff had failed to clean it up earlier. It was only when she stepped inside the kitchen and saw another identical boot print that she realized this was not Omar’s blood.

  Instinctively she turned back toward the door, ready to bolt through it. But she stopped when she heard Memphis Beck step into the hallway behind her and say in a weak voice, “Emma, please, help me…I’m shot.”

  She turned in time to see Beck stagger and catch himself against the wall. “Oh, Memphis!” she said, hurrying to him, steadying him. “I heard you were shot! Two of the railroad detectives said they shot you. They said you were dead!”

  “I might well be…if we don’t get this bleeding to stop,” Beck said with much effort.

  She helped him into her bedroom and seated him on the side of her bed. While he sat there unsteadily, she hurried to a drawer and took out her deceased husband’s yellow riding duster and laid it on the mattress without unfolding it. She gave Beck a nudge and guided him backward onto the bed, keeping his bloody wound from lying on the clean white bedsheet.

  “Lie still here,” she said, hurriedly taking off his boots and dropping them to the floor. “I’ll get a pan of water and some strips of cloth for bandages.”

  “I didn’t know…where else to go,” Beck said apologetically. “I know how you always hated…dressing gunshot wounds.”

  “Nonsense,” Emma said wryly, “I always preferred it over dancing.” Suddenly she felt like her old self again, ignoring the blood, for the moment ignoring the danger of having a wanted man lying wounded in her bed. “Did the bullet go all the way through?” she asked. As she spoke she unbuttoned his shirt for a closer look.

  “Yes…it did,” Beck said, groggy from the loss of blood.

  “Thank God for that,” she said, letting out a sigh of relief. “It’s cutting a bullet out that I always dreaded doing.”

  Beck managed a weak smile. “I’m sorry, Emma.”

  “It’s all right.” She patted his forearm and said, “I’ll be right back.” She turned and left the room, going about her task swiftly, calmly, holding her bloody hands out in front of her.

  “I’m glad…I made it…back here,” Beck said, his voice failing him as he drifted into unconsciousness.

  After a full day of searching all over the hillsides in vain for Memphis Beck’s body, Jack Strap and Vlak Blesko stepped down from their saddles and looked back toward the rest of the posse riding a hundred yards behind them. “We better find him soon, Vlak,” Strap said, “before the colonel starts getting testy with us.”

  Leaving their horses standing a few feet back from the edge of a cliff, the pair eased over for a look down onto the winding trail below. As soon as Strap spotted three horsemen, he jerked back quickly and gave the Romanian an excited look. “Stay back out of sight, Vlak!”

  “Is it him?” The Romanian started to ease forward for a peep of his own, but Strap pulled him back.

  “No,” Strap whispered, “it’s the ranger and two prisoners.” He took out a field lens and opened it. “You stay back. I want to get a good look at them. This might be our chance to put a bullet in Sam Burrack for what he did to us.”

  The Romanian stood back and watched Strap stoop down and move forward in a crouch. “Who are de prisoners?”

  “As soon as I find out, Vlak, I will be sure to let you know,” Strap said in an irritated tone. He held the field lens to his right eye and focused on the prisoners riding in front of the ranger. As if on cue, Tom Cat Weaver took off his hat with his cuffed hands and ran a bandanna across his forehead.

  “Whoa!” Strap said over his shoulder. “One of them is Thomas Weaver.”

  “Tom Cat Weaver,” Vlak said with a tight smile. He turned to his horse and yanked his rifle from its saddle boot.

  Hearing the Romanian lever a round into the rifle chamber, Strap said, “That’s right, if we can’t give the colonel Beck, we’ll hand him Tom Cat Weaver.” He looked back to the riders as he said, “Bring my rifle too.”

  With both rifles in hand, the Romanian crept forward in a crouch and laid Strap’s Winchester down on the ground beside him. “Who is de other prisoner?” he asked.

  “I can’t see his face from this angle,” said Strap, “but if he’s riding with Tom Cat, you can bet he’s Hole-in-the-wall too.”

  “Ve are going to shoot them both, vithout telling the colonel first?” Blesko asked.

  “Oh no, Vlak, we’re not going to shoot the ranger’s prisoners. We’ll feed them to the colonel’s rope,” Strap said with a slight chuckle, reaching around and picking up his rifle. “I’m going to shoot the ranger, right now, while I’ve got him in my sights.”

  “Vithout asking the colonel?” Blesko said.

  “If I ask him, he might say no,” Strap said with a sly grin.

  “I don’t like doing this,” Blesko said.

  “All right, don’t do it,” said Strap. He levered a round into his rifle chamber and checked the sights. “In fact, why don’t you ride back there and tell the colonel to get his men down onto the trail? Don’t mention the ranger, just tell him that I’m about to drop two of the Hole-in-the-wall Gang right into his lap.” He turned back to the trail below, this time looking at the ranger down the barrel of his Winchester instead of through a field lens.

  Shaking his head in doubt, the Romanian turned to his horse, climbed into the saddle, and batted his heels to the horse’s side….

  On the trail below, the ranger rode along behind the prisoners at a walk, watching them, yet having seen nothing in their behavior so far that made him think they might attempt an escape. In the dimming afternoon sunlight, he had just pushed his sombrero brim up, when suddenly he caught a flash of sunlight on the cliff ledge ahead of them, over a hundred feet up the hillside.

  “Ambush!” he shouted in reflex. On instinct he jerked Black Pot sharply to the side to disrupt any aim that might already have been taken on him. Then before the stallion had settled, Sam swung down from his saddle and yanked his rifle from its boot on his way.

  From the cliff edge, Jack Strap triggered his shot as the ranger raised his rife toward the flash of sunlight he’d seen only a second earlier. No sooner had Strap’s shot hit the ground near the ranger’s feet than the ranger’s return shot whistled past Strap’s head.

  “Damn you, Ranger!” said Strap. Levering another round, he fired just as the ranger slipped over the edge of the trail and out of sight.

  Hearing Sam’s warning, followed by the first rifle shot from above them, Drew and Weaver had batted their horses forward along the winding trail. As the ranger’s stallion raced past them, Bennie Drew even with his hands cuffed, managed to sidle close enough to the big Appaloosa to grab it by its loose reins and keep it running alongside him.

  Off the edge of the trail, Sam rolled onto his back and levered another round into his rifle chamber. Crawling back up to the edge, he lay quietly for the next few minutes, searching back and forth along the ridgeline for any sign of the rifleman. When he did venture up onto the trail, he picked up his sombrero from the dirt and slapped it against his thigh.

  He looked out along the trail for the stallion as he stepped off the trail, down far enough to not make himself an easy target from the cliff line, and started walking. This late in the afternoon, on foot, he’d be lucky to make it to Little Aces before morning.

  But Sam wasn’t going to stay afoot for long. Two hours later, when the sunlight had gone below the crest of the hill line, he heard a horse walking toward him around a turn in the trail. Crouching, his rifle up and ready, Sam kept out of sight until he saw his big stallion walk into sight. “Bl
ack Pot…” he said with relief, stepping up onto the trail.

  He looked the big stallion over good before stepping into the saddle. Once under way, keeping the stallion checked down to a brisk walk on the shadowy darkening trial, he found Bennie Drew’s horse walking along with its reins hanging to the ground. A bad sign…

  Looking the horse over curiously, he picked up the dangling reins and led the animal alongside him. Twenty yards ahead Sam spotted Tom Cat’s horse standing off the edge of the trail nibbling on a clump of wild grass. An even worse sign, he told himself, nudging Black Pot forward until he reached the horse and picked up its dangling reins.

  Leading the two horses, he looked as deep into the woods along the trail as the waning evening sunlight would allow. He’d had a hunch that whoever had shot at him was not one of the Hole-in-the-wall Gang. His hunch had grown stronger as he’d gathered the horses and ridden on. But the matter wasn’t cinched for him until saw the two outlaws’ bodies drift slowly back and forth in the dim light.

  Nudging his stallion off the trail and over to where the two men hung from ropes thrown over the limb of a mountain ash, Sam took out his knife from his boot well and rode in close enough to cut their bodies loose. “I expect hanging came as no big surprise to either one of you,” he said, looking at the swollen faces.

  He stepped down from his saddle long enough to pull the bodies up onto their horses’ backs. He sniffed the air, noting the lingering smell of flash powder where photographs had been taken of the executed men. He shook his head at the thought of men posing beside corpses as if they were trophies of a hunt. Then he stepped back up into his saddle and rode on toward Little Aces, the dead lying close behind him.

  Chapter 16

  Sheriff Gale decided he’d never met a woman who could change her mind as suddenly as Emma Vertrees. Earlier she had said yes when he’d invited her for a stroll in the moonlight. Now, upon his return, clean shirt, string tie, and all, she acted as if the two of them had never even discussed it. “I’m too tired tonight, Sheriff,” she’d said coldly, at the back door, acting as if she didn’t want him inside her house.